Self-portrait with the Colosseum

Maarten van Heemskerck painted this in 1553, back home in Haarlem, more than 15 years after he had actually walked among the ruins of Rome. He had gone there around 1532 to study the antique up close, filling sketchbooks with the crumbling monuments, and the memory clearly stayed with him. He put himself in the picture twice. The large face in front meets your eye, brush and confidence intact. Behind him, much smaller, a second Heemskerck sits sketching the Colosseum itself. Putting the artist's own face at the centre of a picture, in place of a patron or a saint, was still a fairly new thing to do in the 1550s.